When Will Journalists "Get" Blogs?

Hmmm...consistent theme today... There's was an article by David Lazarus last Friday in the San Francisco Chronicle that talks about how the blog world can never compete with real journalists and that Internet users are going to have to suck it up and start paying for content. His argument? Traditional media reports the news like no one else. He's right...they do, but that doesn't mean people want to pay for it.

Lazarus writes from the standpoint of the silent film actor that laments the invention of the "talkies." Things change, and you learn to deal with it. If you adapt, you'll likely stay afloat, fight it off too long and you'll drown from exhaustion.

Here's the problem with this line of thinking. Say that something has "value" all you want, but value is in the eye of the customer. If the customer doesn't think it's worth paying for...it's not. That doesn't negate the amount of work that goes into the "product," it simply points out that people aren't going to pay for something just because you want them to. In fact, if they won't pay for something, it's your job as a business to figure out how to make it attractive enough that they WILL pay for it.

People find value in blogs, which is why they read them. You can't make something NOT have value just because you wish it didn't.

Hmm...is he saying that we aren't currently accepting the word of journalists at face value? I can read coverage of a single story in a variety of newspapers and see a very clear slant in all of them. Some papers lean right, some lean left, but nearly all of them lean. (Heck, a few have actually fallen over!)

What strikes me as interesting is Lazarus seems to think that bloggers are quite fallible and that journalists are not.

Umm...Rathergate anyone? Bloggers are not the only "reporters" that get the news wrong. Intentionally or accidentally. Otherwise newspaper editors and journalists would not be familiar with the word "retraction."

Now with all of that said, I firmly believe that blogs will NOT replace "real" journalists, but newspapers are fooling themselves if they honestly believe that they can convince people to eschew bloggers in favor of PAYING to read newspaper articles. It's not going to happen.

Sort of like the Internet not going away...
...or search marketing not going away...

Blogs are not going to go away. Citizen media is a NEW component of journalism and the newspapers that recognize and embrace that fact instead of fighting against it will be the ones that survive.